een settled by
war. Allegiances of people, forms of government, boundaries
of kingdoms and republics, all these time out of mind have
been submitted to the arbitrament of the sword, and the
results--treaties, not voluntary, but enforced at the
cannon's mouth--have been upheld by diplomats and
parliaments and courts, by every tribunal that has authority
to speak for law and order and the peace of the world.

It does not lie in the mouth of him who believed in the
right of a State in 1861 to secede, to deny now that the
question was settled by the war, and no formal treaty was
necessary as evidence of what all the world could see. We
had the right as sovereign States to submit to the
arbitrament of war. We did it, and, like others who have
gone to war, we must abide the issue. So that now if a State
should attempt to secede those who should cast their
fortunes with it would be rebels.

But not so in 1861. Then the right of a State to withdraw
from the Union was an open question. Nothing better
illustrates the situation at that time than this incident in
the life of General Lee:

General Lee's Rebuke.

When the great war was over and defeat had come to the
armies Lee had led, he was visiting the house of a friend in
Richmond. With that love of children that always
characterized him, the old hero took upon his knee a
fair-haired boy. The proud mother, to please her guest,
asked the child, "Who is General Lee?" Parrot-like the
expected answer came, "The great Virginian who was a
patriot, true to his native State." And then came the
question, "Who is General Scott?" and the reply, "A
Virginian who was a traitor to his country."

Putting down the child and turning to the mother, the
general said:

"Madam, you should not teach your child such lessons. I will
not listen to such talk. General Scott is not a traitor. He
was true to his convictions of duty, as I was to mine."

What General Lee here said and what even when the fires of
the late war were still smoldering he would have the mothers
of the South teach to their children was that he and
General Scott were both right, because each believed himself
to be right.

And that is precisely what that noble son of New England,
Charles Francis Adams, himself a gallant Union soldier, has
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